Legacy of Secrecy (124 page)

mary states, but the danger he faced must have been even more apparent

to him in the wake of Dr. King’s murder, particularly because the assas-

sin was still eluding authorities. In spite of the risk and what had hap-

pened to his brother, Bobby insisted on always riding in an open car. Just

as he wore JFK’s clothes at times, perhaps Bobby reasoned that if JFK had

been brave enough to ride in an open limousine through Tampa while

a reported assassin was at large, he could do no less. A week after Dr.

King’s murder, Bobby was visiting Lansing, Michigan, when he learned

that police had spotted a gunman on a roof. An aide wanted to close

the blinds in Bobby’s suite, but the Senator replied, “Don’t close them.

If they’re going to shoot, they’ll shoot.” When he left the hotel, Bobby

made a point to step out of his limo and into the crowd.2

Bobby Kennedy traveled with only one security man, trusted aide Bill

Barry (no relation to the
Miami News
reporter of the same name), who

was unarmed. Barry says that Bobby told him he didn’t want armed pro-

tection, or any intrusive or obvious security men or police. Walter Sheri-

dan worried constantly about Bobby’s lack of security, saying, “There

wasn’t anything you could do about it because he was uncontrollable,

and if you tried to protect him he’d get mad as hell.”3

Even before the King assassination, the press had been worried about

Bobby’s safety. After Bobby’s very first campaign stop, journalist John J.

Lindsay told Jimmy Breslin and a group of reporters that while Bobby

“has the stuff to go all the way . . . he’s not going to go all the way. The

reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know

it. Just as sure as we’re sitting here, somebody is going to shoot him. He’s

out there now waiting for him.” According to Thurston Clarke, “one by

one, the other reporters agreed. But none asked the most heartbreaking

question: Did Kennedy himself know it?”4

Bobby was all too aware of the risks. Though they saw each other

infrequently, Bobby had maintained his friendship with Harry Williams.

Harry saw reporter Haynes Johnson occasionally and was friends with

a Kennedy aide, which enabled Harry to meet privately with Bobby

amidst the Senator’s hectic campaign schedule. When Bobby and Harry

spoke, the subject of Almeida and his wife and children always came up,

but the CIA was still supporting them. Bobby’s view on Cuba had soft-

ened since he and Williams had worked together, while Harry had no

desire to reenter the world of covert Cuban operations, now increasingly

the province of violent bombers like Felipe Rivero and Luis Posada.

Harry had not sought out Bobby to encourage him in his run for

president in the hope that Bobby would reinvigorate the action to topple

Castro. Instead, Harry had a different message for his old friend. Hav-

ing seen the coverage of Bobby’s huge crowds, Harry said, “You got

thousands of people around you [but] if some son of a bitch comes out

. . . and just starts shooting . . . ” Harry didn’t have any specific infor-

mation, but said that “with all these Mafia people [still around], they

[are] going to try to kill you.”5 At a small Hollywood gathering with

Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine, novelist Romain Gary essentially

told Bobby the same thing. Bobby’s simple reply to Gary was “That’s

the chance I have to take.”6

Some people hoped for what Bobby’s friends feared. William Sulli-

van, the number-three man in the FBI at the time, wrote that in late April

1968, Bobby’s “name came up at a top-level FBI meeting. Hoover was

not present, and Clyde Tolson was presiding in his absence. I was one of

eight men who heard Tolson respond to the mention of Kennedy’s name

by saying, ‘I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.’” Other

conservatives echoed that sentiment: According to Thurston Clarke,

“the right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler . . . welcomed the pos-

sibility that, as he put it, ‘some white patriot of the Southern tier will

spatter [Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the

snow flies.’”7

Bobby had many enemies because of his stance on civil rights and

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

migrant workers, as well as his fights against Hoffa and organized crime.

Among the remaining primaries, California was the biggest prize, and

Bobby planned to make several trips there in April and May, before

its June 4, 1968, primary. Migrant labor leader César Chávez, head-

quartered in the small California city of Delano, had recovered from

the nearly monthlong hunger strike he’d staged there. César Chávez

worked across California to build support for Kennedy’s campaign

among migrants, Hispanics, and college students. When some of the

students asked Chávez where Bobby had been when they were in New

Hampshire, working for McCarthy in the first primary, Chávez always

replied that Bobby “was walking with me in Delano!”

California’s rich agricultural areas, like Delano, depended on cheap

migrant laborers who often lived in appalling conditions. Delano police

officials would later say that “[Bobby] Kennedy has been to Delano three

times in this past year. Prior to Kennedy’s visits the area was quiet and

untroubled; however, since his visits there have been riots, strikes, and

picketing. The wealthy farmers in the area all hate Kennedy [but] when

Kennedy came to visit Chávez on his hunger strike, he refused to allow

any local police to furnish him [with] any protection.”8

In late April or early May, two Delano police officials overheard a

boast by a wealthy local farmer, Roy Donald Murray, who frequently

gambled large sums in Las Vegas. In uncensored files, quoted here for

the first time and detailed later, Murray said that “he had pledged $2,000

. . . to be utilized to pay off a contract to kill Senator Kennedy,” and that

the Mafia “was behind the letting of the contract.”9

In April 1968, the results of Bobby’s most recent attempt to expose Carlos

Marcello were on America’s newsstands. The press hadn’t followed up

on Bobby’s previous leaked exposé about Marcello, in the September

1967 issues of
Life
magazine, so Bobby couldn’t resist helping a young

writer for
Ramparts
magazine, Michael Dorman, who was working on

an article concerning Marcello. Bobby had begun talking with Dorman

back in February 1968, around the time he had first decided to enter the

presidential race.10

Dorman’s article was about a longtime political-payoff man, Jack Hal-

fen, who provided Mafia money to politicians in both parties. Bobby had

first started investigating Halfen in 1961, and Carlos Marcello was one of

several prominent mob bosses Halfen worked for. The politicians Halfen

claimed he funneled money to included John Connally, Supreme Court

Justice Tom Clark, Texas Congressman Albert Thomas—and Lyndon

Johnson, while he was a leading senator in the 1950s. Halfen claimed

to have funneled a million dollars to LBJ while he was in the Senate, to

block certain gambling legislation.11

According to Gus Russo, Bobby had one of his aides assist Dorman

with his research, and the journalist “received RFK’s personal attention,

meeting with the Senator in his office [where] ‘Senator Kennedy was

enthusiastic about the article.’” By 1972, Dorman would greatly expand

his article into a book called
Payoff
that contained much more material

about Marcello. According to Russo, a memo “obtained from the LBJ

Library in 1992 . . . asserts that the Kennedys helped Dorman write his

book,
Payoff
.” Other memos from the LBJ library show that Johnson had

an advance copy of the article, and knew that Bobby had an interest in

it. In light of the article, the fact that LBJ had been so cordial to Bobby

during their last visit is all the more remarkable.12

Marcello’s friends in the Teamsters were as ruthless as ever, but also

pragmatic. The $2 million fund to “spring Hoffa” from prison hadn’t

secured his release, and for Hoffa as well as his allies, the prospect of

Hoffa’s continued imprisonment during a Bobby Kennedy presidency

would have been their worst nightmare. Evan Thomas documented

that in the spring of 1968, after Bobby announced his run for the

presidency:

. . . a Teamster leader came to Senator Edward Kennedy proposing

that the Teamsters would give RFK $1 million and help him at the

polls—if RFK would . . . shorten Jimmy Hoffa’s prison sentence. . . .

RFK told brother Ted, “Well, you tell so and so that if I get to be

president, then Jimmy Hoffa will never get out of jail and there will

be a lot more of them in jail.”13

Bobby Kennedy faced his first primary challenge in Indiana on May 7,

1968. Though Indiana was considered a conservative state, Bobby won,

with 42 percent of the vote to Eugene McCarthy’s 27 percent (the remain-

ing votes went to the governor as a favorite-son stand-in for Hubert

Humphrey). However, Bobby and his advisors believed he needed to

do even better, so that he could head into the Democratic convention in

Chicago with the momentum needed to secure the nomination. Neither

Bobby nor any other candidate could win enough votes in the primaries

to secure the nomination, so for Bobby, momentum was everything.14

The following week, in Nebraska, Bobby scored a more decisive

victory over McCarthy—51 percent to 31 percent—but it still wasn’t

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

enough to drive his rival from the race. For Bobby, everything would

come down to the two West Coast primaries: Oregon, on May 28, and

especially California, on June 4. Bobby would need to win at least the

latter to have any realistic hope of securing the nomination.15

Bobby visited California as much as possible, but he had to deal with

several distractions during May, two involving President Johnson. On

May 10, 1968, the preliminary peace talks with North Vietnam began,

with Bobby’s old Cuban operations subordinate Cyrus Vance as one

of two US negotiators. In this instance, Bobby’s goals coincided with

LBJ’s because if steps toward peace were soon announced, that would

take much of the wind out of McCarthy’s campaign, since the war was

his main issue. For LBJ, securing a peace deal was his only chance to

leave office on a high note—otherwise, his legacy would be the war

he’d hugely expanded but couldn’t win. President Johnson also knew a

peace agreement was probably the only way to keep a Democrat in the

White House, though LBJ wanted that person to be his vice president,

Hubert Humphrey.16

Though Bobby and Johnson shared peace in Vietnam as a goal, Bobby

probably suspected that LBJ had a hand with Hoover in new articles

slamming Bobby by Drew Pearson that began appearing in late May.

This time, the stories weren’t about Cuba or JFK’s assassination. As

described by Evan Thomas, on May 22, 1968, Pearson printed the “alle-

gation that RFK had paid off a witness in one of the Hoffa cases. Then

on May 24 . . . Pearson revealed that RFK, as attorney general, had

authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King.” It’s unclear if the deci-

sion to leak the story originated with LBJ or if Hoover had first leaked

it to an LBJ aide who brought it to President Johnson’s attention. But

LBJ certainly supported the leak and talked with Pearson in the White

House six days before the story ran.17

Luckily for Bobby, one of the stories contained an error, saying that

Bobby had not only approved phone wiretaps on Dr. King, but also

approved placing “bugs” in King’s hotel rooms. Since Bobby had

approved the wiretaps but not the bugs, he was able to issue carefully

worded denials giving Bobby enough wiggle room to evade most of

the blame in the press, to the public, and even among many of his own

staff.18

During his hectic May campaigning, Bobby also followed the trials

of Carlos Marcello and Johnny Rosselli. Thanks to a change of venue,

Marcello finally stood trial in Laredo, Texas, on May 20, 1968, for slug-

ging the FBI agent in New Orleans in 1966. John H. Davis writes that

“amid widespread rumors of tampering, the trial ended in a hung jury.”

Bobby could perhaps take solace that the Justice Department’s new

Organized Crime Strike Force was determined to retry Marcello on the

same charges.19

How much Bobby suspected Johnny Rosselli in JFK’s murder is not

known, though in 1992, a close Kennedy aide indicated to us Rosselli’s

responsibility (along with Marcello’s and Trafficante’s). With Bobby’s

own investigations pointing toward Marcello, his Mafia associates, and

those involved in anti-Castro operations, Bobby would have realized

at least that Rosselli was a likely suspect. Rosselli was convicted in Los

Angeles of failure to register as an alien on May 23, 1968, and would